Why Transvault Support is Unbeatable
As part of the “Meet The Team” series, Director of Global Support Services, Pete Dyche, explores the aspects of his department that makes Transvault Support second to none…
I joined Transvault in 2013, and during my time with the company, we’ve introduced a number of changes to drive improvements to our Support service delivery, which has been reflected in the feedback received by customers and partners alike. We’ve implemented the new Transvault Support Help Center, which includes our very successful Knowledgebase to provide a self-service function, more efficient workflows and improved ticket management.
Our Support team has continued to grow and develop and are assigned a number of responsibilities outside of ticket management. These include; technical training, ‘smoke testing’ of pre-release product builds, developing our partner lab environments and authoring new partner-facing technical content (including our recently revamped Transvault Migrator Certification). Because I’m so proud of how far we’ve come, I want to share some of the reasons why I believe Transvault Support is unbeatable:
Dedicated Expert Teams
The best support helpdesks are those where ALL the staff are employed by the service provider and not outsourced or off-shored. This approach ensures that our Support Specialists are focused solely on supporting Transvault products and partner/customer migration projects, allowing them to develop their expertise and experience. ‘Specialisms’ on specific archive platforms and technologies are assigned to individuals, which enables them to develop specific area expertise, to ‘deep-dive’ challenging reported issues and become an ‘go to’ specialist within the company for that technology.
Given the complex and varied nature of migration projects, having dedicated Support Specialists ensures a rapid and efficient resolution.
Clear Helpdesk Objectives
Setting clear and attainable goals is vital to a highly effective, cohesive helpdesk as they provide means of measuring key deliverables and driving improvements to our service delivery. Defining a metric is similar to telling a joke – if you have to spend too much time explaining it then it won’t work. So it’s important for our team members to understand a given metric, how they can influence it and what is expected of them. These metrics include “Time To Resolution” (TTR) rate, “average end-user wait time” and “end-user satisfaction rating”. These metrics are continually monitored, reviewed and published internally to enable our Support Specialists to focus their working practices and efforts accordingly.
Support goals reflect and underpin a key priority for Transvault, to deliver industry-leading ‘Platinum’ service to all our customers and partners.
Centralized Support
All our Support Specialists (1st line Support agents) are managed from a single location which helps ensure that customers and partners receive excellent service during Transvault Support working hours, which is not impacted by different personnel following shift handovers. This approach has encouraged collaboration on specific issues and knowledge sharing, with particular emphasis on growing the partner-facing support knowledgebase. By developing the knowledge and experience of the entire team there are no ‘single points of failure’, which are often observed in support environments when individuals are more independent and act to silo their knowledge.
Transvault provide a centralized, collaborative helpdesk which has resulted in massively improved response/resolution times and effective escalation paths are available to help expedite reported issue resolution.
Knowledge Sharing
Transvault Support Specialists are highly knowledgeable and experienced in the range of issues that might arise during a migration. They are also responsible for a great deal more than managing support tickets. Responsibilities include; targeted authoring of knowledgebase articles to enable customers/partners to ‘self-service’, updating product documentation for existing and up-coming releases, daily rota for managing product queries, updating Migrator certification collateral and lab environments and the smoke-testing of all products prior to scheduled partner releases to help familiarize with new functionality and address any potential issues. Time is also allocated to training including vendor-specific products such as Microsoft SQL and dedicated lab environments are readily available to reproduce reported issues and explore possible enhancements such as improving migration performance.
The Transvault Support team are personally accountable, but also completely collaborative. They have been proven to exceed expectations by encouraging communication, knowledge-sharing and by continuing to invest in developing staff knowledge and experience.
There’s a whole host of other reasons that make my team great, but I will save them for another post and wish you well in your migration projects for the time being. I hope you won’t have much cause to speak to me or my team members any time soon, but if you do, then I have every confidence your ticket will be handled with the utmost care, professionalism and courtesy. Happy migrating!